PRObooks
ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer s Notebook
With the impending final release of ASP.NET 2.0, publishers have been ramping up their catalogs to address the masses of Microsoft developers preparing to leverage the improvements in the new version. While some of these new titles have taken the approach of education from the beginner s point of view, others have opted to focus exclusively on the experienced ASP.NET 1.x developer seeking to quickly grok the most powerful new features ASP.NET 2.0 has to offer. It is this tactic that O Reilly has designed into their Developer Notebook series. Each of these books look and read like computer experiment lab books, complete with simulated coffee ring stains, grid paper background, and margin notes.
In ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer s Notebook, experienced author Wei-Meng Lee assumes the reader has adequate working familiarity with ASP.NET 1.x and jumps right in with the first chapter providing an overview of the most prominent new features of the 2.0 release. An obligatory new project tutorial rapidly introduces the Visual Studio 2005 IDE and the improvements made in ASP.NET 2.0 generic project creation. Chapter 2 introduces Microsoft s helpful new concept of Master Pages, a type of visual page inheritance that is similar to Windows Form inheritance . The chapter also touches on Microsoft s new TreeView control, a formal in-the-box Microsoft interpretation of a control that has been realized and commoditized by so many third-party Microsoft Web component vendors.
Chapter 3 introduces readers to Web parts, a Microsoft portal-widget concept that has been part of the company s SharePoint Server and is now a native feature in the new ASP.NET release. While it remains to be seen if this will accelerate the quality and quantity of Web parts for SharePoint and other Web part-consumable services, it is nevertheless Microsoft s intention to propagate the Web Parts Framework beyond the SharePoint universe. Data Access is the topic of the fourth chapter, relying primarily on Microsoft s forthcoming SQL Server 2005 as the primary DBMS of demonstrable choice. Of most interest are the examples of native component data caching and connection string encryption, two improvements hotly anticipated by seasoned ASP.NET developers. The topic of security continues into Chapter 5 with the presentation of examples using Microsoft s new security controls and a discussion of Microsoft s Membership Provider Model.
Performance gains and the techniques to employ these enhancements are exercised in Chapter 6, followed by managing user profiles in Chapter 7. The final chapter on Themes, Skins, and Localization shows how Themes extend beyond CSS to manage the look and feel of page display and control properties throughout a site. And anyone who has created their own custom localization mechanisms in the past can now rely on Microsoft s Auto-culture handling and page directive and CultureInfo objects.
Sample code is VB.NET-based, along with plenty of XML configuration file listings; code can be downloaded from the author s Web site at http://www.developerlearningsolutions.com. In general, the book is a decent value for veteran ASP.NET developers seeking the straight scoop on the most notable new capabilities the 2.0 release has to offer.
Mike Riley
Rating:
Title: ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer s Notebook
Author: Wei-Meng Lee
Publisher: O Reilly
ISBN: 0-596-00812-0
Book Web Site: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/aspnetadn/
Price: US$29.95
Page Count: 332
